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Tracking marketing campaigns has always been a tricky business. While an increase in sales or websites visits gives clues that a campaign is being effective, it’s a fairly crude method in many ways.

Online marketing, however, is much more trackable, in that you can see not only whether people like what you’re doing, from increased likes, mentions, as well as the sales and website hits mentioned above, but so, so much more.

As ever, what you get out of tracking your marketing depends on no small degree on what you put in. Crucially, you need to know from the start what it is you want to measure and what will best show you this, as well as what your starting point is, so you can gauge success or otherwise.

In terms of online marketing, the most likely measures of success you will be looking for are increases in sales, leads and followers. Other common tracking requests are for mentions of your company and/or its products online, and particularly whether the conversation around these is broadly positive or negative (this is often called sentiment). What your company’s overall reach is on all its platforms is another one to consider, as well as the proportion of visits and sales that are driven by social media mentions and traffic. Engagement, too, can be an interesting one to get detailed data for, as it highlights which areas of your website are effective at getting and keeping visitors interested, and which rarely see click-throughs, downloads, or high average time-on-page statistics.

Don’t only limit this tracking to your own company either – tracking your competitors, insofar as you are able, can also allow you to see how you compare to them, particularly in terms of brand popularity and visibility. You can then see if this varies over the course of your campaign.

As we said at the beginning, having a benchmark for the metrics you are measuring is important, as is having realistic goals, such as a percentage increase in sales or visits, or a concrete number of new followers on your social media network of choice.

In terms of which product to use, there are many on the market, starting from free upwards, and which you choose will rely heavily both on your budget and what you need from your analysis.